Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer in Stores Now

Are you or a loved one suffering from Ovarian Cancer? Check out this inspiring memoir by Professor Susan Gubar.

After learning she had advanced ovarian cancer, Susan Gubar felt the need to reassure her two grown daughters that not even death could separate them. Although she lacks conventional faith in religion or the afterlife, Gubar says, "I found myself earnestly promising one and then the other of my distressed daughters, 'I will love you beyond my death. I will love you from another space that you will palpably feel, and feel me to be loving you.'"

Gubar's promise to love her daughters from beyond the grave, if not from heaven, was one of several ways that Gubar surprised herself after her 2008 diagnosis. The disease — which kills more than half of women in five years — forced her to weigh treatments that could extend her life, and even grant temporary remissions, but at the cost of tremendous suffering, says Gubar, 67, author of the new book Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer.

Although she uses her book to testify to the inadequacies and unintentional cruelties of modern cancer care, Gubar says she doesn't fault her physicians, "who have no options but to extend your life through options that hurt you." And Gubar says she's luckier than many other ovarian cancer patients, who don't have supportive friends and family.

But she's also frustrated that doctors have made so little progress against the disease, with survival rates only modestly higher today than in the 1970s. Ever the activist, Gubar writes, "Something must be done to rectify the miserable inadequacies of current medical responses to ovarian cancer." Yet she also hopes that medical advances will quickly make her critique sound outdated, that her book will become a "historical curiosity quite soon, as soon as possible, sooner than possible."

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-05-20/Susan-Gruber-ovarian-cancer/55092236/1

It’s National Women’s Health Week!

Ladies, do yourselves a favor and request the FDA’s free Healthy Women's Action Kit. It contains tips that can help women of every age. The topics include: buying contact lenses online,
mammograms, hypertension, cholesterol, Pap tests, menopause, hormones, help in quitting smoking, osteoporosis, diabetes and more.

The Healthy Women's Action Kits are easy to order. To get a kit visit  www.promotions.usa.gov/dearabby.html; or call (888)8-PUEBLO (that's (888) 878-3256 ) weekdays 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. You can also read the publications online in PDF format, download them to your computer and print them. Don't wait, because supplies are limited.

Science on Moms, Grandmothers

Just in time for Mother's Day, a new scientific study has reaffirmed the importance of mothers and grandmothers, this time in the realm of cancer genetics. "BRCA1/2 mutations, fertility and the grandmother effect" was just published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, by Jack da Silva of Australia's Adelaide University.

In the article, da Silva examines how the role of the 'breast cancer genes' BRCA1 and BRCA2 affect fertility and how mutations in them came to be as frequent in the population as they are. The text of the article is available free online, but you'll need a library with academic credentials to access the full content.

The thrust of the article is an interesting and accessible (to non-science folk) analysis of some notable features of BRCA1/2. Even though the variety of cancers associated with BRCA1/2 are brought on later in life—after reproductive age—the mutations that bring about those cancers are highly correlated to increased fertility rates, up to 48%.

The question this work posed was: if BRCA1/2 mutations have an associated increase in fertility, then why haven't they become more prevalent in the population? If offspring carrying the mutations are birthed at higher rates, then the mutations should spread through the population over generations.

The answer appeared to lie in a combination of factors: the "grandmother effect" and the nature of earlier human life as hunter-gatherers. When population records were examined, it was found that having a surviving grandmother during child rearing increased the survival odds of that child. And so while the BRCA1/2 mutations might increase fertility, they decreased the survival of grandmothers as the cancers develop later in life and this effect propagated to the grandchildren so that irrespective of their status of a carrier, having a grandmother around to help raise them made a big difference in their survival. This was observed even in fairly recent human civilizations, and as da Silva examined older civilizations' records, the effect appeared to be more pronounced.

So throughout human history grandmothers and mothers have been important not just through genetic links, but also in ways that can't be encoded in DNA.

Andrea Fritz

Cancer is terrible. Cancer is nothing anyone should ever have to deal with. But that doesn't mean it can't sometimes lead to good things—inspiring greatness and tenacity not known before. Andrea Fritz has faced cancer and more only to come out even more determined than ever. And it shows in her achievements.

from ReadMedia:

At only 13 years of age, Andrea Fritz of Johnstown, Pa., told her parents she planned to go to medical school in order to make a difference in the lives of others, a goal determined by her own encounter with a rare form of cancer. Since making her decision, Fritz has dedicated her time to the sciences and to fighting cancer through service, ultimately becoming the chemistry major with the highest GPA in her class, an active student at SJU and a nationally recognized fundraiser – despite the obstacles she's fought along the way. On Saturday, May 12, Fritz will don her cap and gown and receive her diploma alongside more than 1,000 of her peers, and take the next step toward her goal: in the fall, she will begin her studies at Drexel University's College of Medicine, the same medical school her father attended when it was Hahnemann University.

The day she told her parents her plan to become a doctor, Fritz was recovering from the first of several surgeries to treat synovial sarcoma, a cancer that typically occurs near the joints in the arms and legs. With her cancer located in her leg, Fritz's treatment left her temporarily confined to a wheelchair, and then sent her through years of physical therapy.

For a teenager who was active in sports, the experience led her to choose a new outlet for her energy: fundraising for Relay for Life, which benefits the American Cancer Society.

"During that time, I was looking for something to do," says Fritz. "I'd always been involved in sports and I wanted to stay active."

During high school, Fritz raised $100,000 for Relay for Life through a letter campaign targeted at her family and friends. The amount earned her the distinction of highest youth fundraiser in the nation, and, when she applied to college, the Eagles Fly for Leukemia Scholarship to SJU. Partnered with the Eagles Fly for Leukemia Foundation, established by Philadelphia Eagles' former tight end Fred Hill, SJU offers the full-tuition scholarship to an incoming freshman who has survived cancer through strength, courage and determination.

This is one Johnstown native we can all take quite some hometown pride in.